Nursing Theorist

Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care. Wikipedia

Born: July 13, 1925, Sutton Died: August 10, 2012 Education: University of Washington

Transcultural Care Theory and Ethnonursing

• Developed the Transcultural Nursing Model. She advocated that nursing is a humanistic and scientific mode of helping a client through specific cultural caring processes (cultural values, beliefs and practices) to improve or maintain a health condition.
• Nursing is a learned humanistic and scientific profession and discipline which is focused on human care phenomena and activities in order to assist, support, facilitate, or enable individuals or groups to maintain or regain their well being (or health) in culturally meaningful and beneficial ways, or to help people face handicaps or death.
• Transcultural nursing as a learned subfield or branch of nursing which focuses upon the comparative study and analysis of cultures with respect to nursing and health-illness caring practices, beliefs and values with the goal to provide meaningful and efficacious nursing care services to people according to their cultural values and health-illness context.
• Focuses on the fact that different cultures have different caring behaviors and different health and illness values, beliefs, and patterns of behaviors.
• Awareness of the differences allows the nurse to design culture-specific nursing interventions.